Elite L.A. Search and Rescue Team Member Hopes to Inspire Other Women

Over the past week, 67 members of California Urban Search and Rescue Task Force-2 — an elite search and rescue team out of the Los Angeles County Fire Department — have worked around the clock in Mexico City helping the city recover from the devastating 7.1-magnitude earthquake.

Two women are on the team. One of them is 36-year-old Capt. Sara Rathbun, a communications specialist.

“That means gadgets,” she says.

In other words, it means making sure the rescue team has functioning radios and setting up satellite internet, among a whole lot of other responsibilities. But don’t mistake Rathbun for a gadget geek. She’s also trained as a rescue worker — that’s what she did after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan — and as a medical specialist, which she worked as after the 2015 earthquake in Nepal.

Rathbun has been breaking stereotypes for a long time.

As a high school senior in Los Angeles County, she went to pick up her younger brother from football practice. The coach invited her to join the team.

“And I said, ‘You would mess yourself if I came out here. What a nightmare for you.’ And he said, ‘No, if you’re really interested. I’ve seen you. You’re an athlete. You’ve been out on the track. I see you pole vaulting and doing soccer and stuff. I’d love to have you.'”

So she joined the team as a cornerback, tackling the opposing teams’ wide receivers.

Rathbun’s parents raised her to believe she could do anything she wanted to. But she says it wasn’t until she saw a woman rappelling out of a helicopter with her paramedic bag that it all clicked.

That image led her to join the Los Angeles Fire Department and eventually Task Force-2, one of the elite search-and-rescue teams the U.S. government sends around the world to provide assistance after a disaster. Rathbun calls it the “best job in the world.”

Rathbun says being a woman on the team has its challenges. For example, some cultures aren’t comfortable with a female rescue worker, in which case she willingly takes a behind-the-scenes role (not the case in Mexico).

But being a woman also has its benefits. Rathbun says children in crisis often gravitate toward female figures. And there’s the fact that her team sees some terrible things.

“What is ironic is I have more tools to deal with it than perhaps the men do, because they are in a position where it is not socially acceptable for them to show as much emotion as it is for me,” she says.

Just as it was the woman rappelling out of a helicopter that inspired Rathbun, she hopes other women will be inspired by her example.

California Task Force-2 is packing up to head home to Los Angeles this week. Until the next time they get called out.